


Hic Jacet

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Autopsy, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-17 03:10:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8128072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: He doesn't say Emily's name, but Scully sees her ghost in his eyes.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my squad for letting me bounce ideas off of them and pester them with Latin. Special thanks to dashakay for her always excellent beta advice. 

The bodies are small, the heaviest weighing in at forty-seven  
pounds. They rest on their gurneys like the glass-eyed dolls she used to admire in store windows, the kinds in ruffles and lace. Pretty maids all in a row.

She can’t see their smashed-in skulls like this, and their braided hair is dark enough to hide the dried blood. She can’t see the splinters of bone in the gray matter, the radial fractures and hematomas.

Scully undresses them for the external exam, folds their little clothes at their feet. There’s almost no blood on the girls’ fancy dresses and she suspects they weren’t put on until after the killing blows. She sketches their wounds as best she can, notes the bits of tissue beneath their polished nails, the shiny gloss on their rosebud mouths.

She jots in her notes: _Party?_

Scully glances at her instrument tray. Her field makes no accommodations for children; there are no undersized scalpels or miniature blocks to cradle their little heads. She dislikes opening their rounded bellies, unbraiding their plaits and peeling off their lacy socks. 

She dislikes it, but she does it.

Mulder has been hovering about her since they got here, his eyes full of dark worry, the anticipation of her pain. It implies a weakness she doesn’t want to possess, a flaw in the grain of her marble.

He doesn’t say Emily’s name but Scully sees her ghost in his eyes.

Did he really think that would make this harder? That she didn’t understand the tragedy of a dead child before Emily melted away? Did he think she forgot about the weight of that small corpse until she handled another?

It exhausts her sometimes, the way he holds the dead and the living together in his heart. He forgets which is which sometimes, but she never does. 

The living can be saved.

Scully opens the first girl with a practiced hand, reflects the skin to reveal bones as white as milk teeth. A body can’t lie to you the way a witness can. It can’t obfuscate and twist itself, hiding secrets and loyalties. It will wait patiently for days and months and years for you to read it, for you to understand.

_Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae._

She takes fluids and tissue samples, clips the soft ribs easily with her shears to avoid bone dust. The organ pluck goes on the steel counter. Scully weighs and measures, thinking, as she often does, of Duncan MacDougall’s assertion that the soul weighs twenty-one grams. 

Would the girls’ souls be lighter? Would hers be heavier, stained and weighted as it is? His sample size of six patients vexes her as the empirical basis for an average; a man of science should have known better. 

The liver is dense and meaty beneath her breadknife, the color of wine. Lungs now, spongy and bubblegum pink, nestled around the little heart.

Quick work with the enterotome, breathing though her mouth, and she thinks of Mulder thinking of Emily. Does Mulder imagine she puts Emily’s face on these girls? No one did this to her lost daughter, no one examined her for disease or trauma. They took her back to where they’d made her, studied their mistakes and vowed to try again. Emily was a hypothesis in need of adjustment.

Semi digested cupcakes in the stomach, pink frosting and sprinkles. Milky tea and cucumbers. 

“Ha!” she says to no one, pleased to have her suspicion confirmed.

Mulder would have had tea parties with Emily, she’s sure of it. He’s good with children, relating to their sense of being marginalized and disbelieved. Scully’s afraid to let go, afraid to be silly and undisciplined. Afraid to unravel and have no way to knit herself back up.

The brain now. Scully takes care to minimize the hair she cuts off, feels the queasy shift of the small fractured skull in her hands. Bloody and gelatinous, the brain shows clear trauma. Scully separates the pons and cerebellum easily, the lizard brain from the human. What had their underdeveloped prefrontal cortices made of what was happening? Had the last girl seen the first two die, or was she sweetly stupid on cake and warm tea?

Emily hadn’t known in the end, not really, and Scully reminds herself that the dead are not the dying. She hadn’t known what to do in any case, how to comfort a strange girl with a strange disease. She did not love Emily but she loved the idea of her.

Scully believes Mulder has ideas that he loves as well, and that she is a part of them. He sees a tenderness in her that she does not believe exists, and she is afraid of what may happen between them should he discover this particular truth. She is aware of her own complicity, of resenting his idealization while also striving to live up to it. She wants to be worthy of his pedestal.

What will he think if she doesn’t shatter? What will he think if this doesn’t hurt? She knows her reputation and wishes her colleagues could see what the world is like when one is 5'3" and doe-eyed, armed with a Sig and an intellect. She wishes they knew where she fought her hardest battles.

Scully sighs, peels her slippery gloves off to rest for a bit.

Mulder’s hand was at her waist this morning, like her backbone wasn’t strong enough without his support. “Call if you need me,” he said before he left her here. Well, she doesn’t need him. She needs a cigarette or an Altoid to get the butcher-shop taste out of her mouth, a hot shower to get the kinks out of her neck. 

But she knows the importance of lies that must be told, that they are as demanding as the truth. Scully reaches into her pocket for her phone. She dials, waits for his answer.

“It’s me,” she says, keeps her voice low and soft. “I could use a break. Would you mind coming by to pick me up?

"Of course,” he says in the same gentle tone. “I’ll be there in fifteen. We’ll get lunch.”

“Thank you.”

She hangs up, throws her bloody gear away. A quick change into street clothes and she’s ready for her pedestal again, so afraid to hit the ground.


End file.
